Jane Bown pushes to the front of a scrum of 'snappers' during a London press conference given by Bette Davis in 1975 Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

Andrew Billen: Journalist

For a long time my hall boasted three photographs by Jane, taken over consecutive days in America in 1994. One was of the Coen brothers, arranged geometrically in the doorway of their Manhattan apartment, and laughing. Another was of the feminist thinker Kate Millett, in shorts and muddy boots on her farm in Poughkeepsie. The third had a becapped Michael Moore thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets. They represented by no means the peak of Jane’s long career. Although the Coen brothers wrote to say it was the best portrait they had ever had, Moore’s was only a bit better than a snap. I did, however, regard them as mementoes of an apex in my professional life, unlikely to be exceeded. I had been bouncing around New York, city and state, with not only the best portrait photographer in Britain, but a friend. As Jane would say: “We had fun, didn’t we?”

The previous autumn, Rebecca Nicolson, editor of the Observer magazine, had teamed me up with Jane for weekly interviews: my words on the left of the spread, a full-page black-and-white portrait by her on the right. Incredibly, Jane felt – and there was some truth to it – that she had been rather forgotten by the paper and her reluctance to shoot in colour had cost her space in the magazine. She spoke later of our three-year stint together (pointlessly, to both our minds, ended by regime change) as having revived her both professionally and personally. From being a rather remote figure whom we younger Observerites felt in respectful awe of, Jane became part of the gang (or we became part of hers).

She opened her home up to us for weekend parties and we got to know Martin, her genial, under-appreciated husband, her friends (eclectic was hardly the word) and her son, Hugo, to whom she was devoted and whose personal life constituted the subject matter of maybe 50% of our conversations. During the week she would lunch with us feature writers and editors in bad Italian restaurants in Clerkenwell. Her only complaint was that we did not drink enough, and certainly not as much as our predecessors from the 1950s and 1960s she had outlasted.

She was my calling card for the celebrity interviews. Who – unless you were an Observer journalist and the victim of one of her notoriously unflattering by-line pictures – would not want their portrait taken by Jane Bown, even at the risk of 1,500 catty words by me? After I had written a disobliging piece about David Hare, he told me the only redeeming aspect of the experience had been Jane’s picture and how crushed he was later to meet her and discover she regarded it as one of her worst. Not that the process of being photographed by Jane, though brief, was always painless. I remember her complaining to the handsome novelist William Boyd how boring his face was. She commanded Paul Merton to lie on the floor during the first part of his interview because the light was better; “Ooh, it’s nice to sit down,” he said when she left us to it.

I don’t think her fame had spread to America. No doubt the Coens, Millett and Moore were surprised to be photographed by what appeared to a rather posh, little old lady who whipped her camera from a wicker basket. Most people soon got her, however. As soon as she had left the room, Robin Williams reproduced her for me as if by Memorex, an instant addition to his repertoire of alter egos. Unlikely though it seems, the singer Björk became, as Jane would put it, “a pal”.

Her affinity with pop stars, whose music she almost certainly never listened to, was a symptom of a barely suppressed Bohemianism beneath the slightly chipped veneer of a hen-keeping home counties lady. After we attended, on another American jaunt (those were the days), a PJ Harvey concert, she said that she wanted to get on the bus and join the tour. She was already in her late 60s.

Working with Jane was a sentimental education. Although I resisted admitting it for a long time, she was a good judge of character. I resisted because she judged people by reading their faces. You cannot judge people by how they look, I told her. She insisted: “But I think you can.” It was also a masterclass in professionalism. She always got the picture. It is her friendship I shall miss, however, odd though it probably seemed. Indeed, when I told my future wife that a photographer was staying the night in my flat, she turned up to check she really was in her 80s.

To the end, her determination was inspiring, and a little worrying. I love the picture of the younger Jane elbowing her way to the front of a crowd of “snappers” to get the best picture of Bette Davis, but in her last years she seemed equally determined not to put up with all this illness-enforced inactivity.

A few weeks ago in her nursing home, refusing to eat, she assured me that she was perfectly content, and by that she meant content to die. She had not taken a picture for a couple of years. Life without a camera was really no life for her at all.

Anthony Blunt, photographed by Jane 10 years before being revealed as the ‘fourth man’ in the notorious Cambridge spy ring. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Donald Trelford: Former Observer editor

In my early days on the Observer, I went with Jane Bown to interview Sir Anthony Blunt, then director of the Courtauld Institute, about the acquisition of a priceless collection of early Italian art. The resulting article was illustrated by some of the paintings and a shot of the Gloucestershire country house where they had been hidden for many years by a reclusive collector.

What the article did not include was a portrait of Blunt Jane took that day. That sinister photograph, showing him partly in light and partly in shadow, became famous more than a decade later when he was exposed as a Soviet spy. I had remembered him as patrician, remote, supercilious, but Jane had seen more.

When I tackled her about the Blunt portrait (which is reproduced in her collection, The Gentle Eye), and how she could tell he was a “wrong ’un”years before anyone else, she replied: “It wasn’t me. It was the camera. It saw something creepy in his face.” This story seems to me to illustrate a side, at least, of Jane Bown’s genius, the source of which she never properly understood herself and about which she remained gracefully modest.

Richard Ashcroft, singer with the Verve. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Richard Ashcroft: Singer-songwriter

The day [Jane took my photograph] was one of the most beautiful I’ve had as a by-product of being a musician. Loads of things happen – some good, some negative – but this was a life-affirming kind of day, to see someone so at ease with their work. Someone who had done these actions, these movements, this checking of the light – the whole process.

And the deepest, most intimate part was the contact I had with Jane and her soul, in a way. Because she told me she liked to fall in love with her subjects. And I felt that. The sun was coming through the windows, and we were very close, just the camera between us – I just felt a real warmth and intimacy, and love really. That is what I felt. I felt love.

The Welsh mining village of Aberfan after the colliery disaster in 1966. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Polly Toynbee: Guardian columnist

When I started out as a reporter on the Observer in 1968, Jane and I often went out together for interviews, profiles and news stories. Oddest were the days we set off in David Astor’s Bentley which she managed to requisition, together with Jimmy the uniformed chauffeur. How did she do it?

Sometimes it was embarrassing to roll up on council estates, at women’s refuges, probation hostels or queues of the homeless at midnight soup kitchens – but never mind the car, she could put anyone at their ease. She taught me a lot about how to look and listen, how to be invisible sometimes. Afterwards, on the way back to the office, her perceptions of the people we met were always as acutely observed as her photographs.

Nobby Clark: Photographer

Jane Bown was without doubt one of the great female photographers. If she’d been in America, she’d have been even bigger. Forget Annie Leibovitz – Jane Bown leaves her standing. I met her in the 1970s when I was the new kid at the Observer. She always called me “Noddy”, but did it with a twinkle in her eye. She was the only person who could get away with that.

Jane loved people, and it shows in her pictures. There’s the great shot of John Betjeman standing on a cliff laughing, which is one of my favourites. She went to photograph the Beatles in the East End and apparently someone said: “There’s this little old lady outside with a shopping bag and she’s come to take your photo.” When her time was up and someone tried to usher her out, Ringo said: “No, let her stay.” They liked having her around. But she was also a very tough photographer and always got the picture. The photographs she took after the Aberfan disaster in Wales are magnificent. She managed to capture the light, even when there was no light at all.

Sean O’Hagan: Observer photography critic

I only worked with Jane a few times, but was struck by the speed at which she worked and her presence, which changed perceptibly from the charming to the charmingly controlling when she looked though the lens of her camera. She got what she wanted and knew immediately when she had the picture she needed. There was no over-shooting, no making sure. That kind of quiet confidence was impressive to behold.

The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said: “The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.” Jane did that in the best pictures she made, quietly and without confrontation or fuss. She captured Francis Bacon’s anxious restlessness, Orson Welles’s intensity, the young David Hockney’s emerging dandyism, Björk’s antic imagination and Samuel Beckett’s inscrutable gaze.

Beckett gazes down at me from the wall every day and that gaze never loses its mystery, its inscrutability. It is one of the great photographic portraits, more real and elusive and penetrating than a painting could ever be. I consider it a crucial piece of evidence – if evidence is still required – that photography is an art form.

Samuel Beckett, pictured leaving the Royal Court Theatre, in London, via the stage door in 1976. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Sandy Nairne: director of the National Portrait Gallery

We have 72 of Jane Bown’s portraits in our collection. She is one of those portrait makers who wonderfully exploited the moment, turning something particular into something that became a part of history. The Samuel Beckett image, for example, is one of the defining images of him. There is a delight – I think it is her delight in other people – that always comes through in her work.

One of the other images that I find striking is her portrait of Billie Whitelaw, the actress, which was taken in 1969. Leaning sideways, holding a cigarette, she looks both glamorous and powerful.